Pilot was asleep before crash: Black box data

New Delhi: Nearly four months after an Air India Express Boeing aircraft crashed during landing at Mangalore airport killing 158 people on board, flight details contained in the black box have revealed that the pilot-in-command was asleep for an hour and 50 minutes when the plane cruised towards its destination.
An analysis of the cockpit voice recorder (CVR)— which contains conversation between two pilots, radio communication between the cockpit crew and others (including conversation with air traffic control personnel) and Digital Flight Data Recorder (DFDR)— was presented before the Court of Inquiry (CoI) headed by Air Marshal (Retd) B N Gokhale here on Wednesday.
In the CoI, officials from Boeing, the manufacturer of the aircraft, and GE, which was involved in decoding the black box, presented their findings.
Only excerpts of the black box data were released on Wednesday and a detailed report will be submitted to the Centre along with the CoI findings by the end of this month.
The cockpit transcripts and coded DFDR information were released to silence persistent speculation that reasons other than pilot error might have contributed to the doom of the aircraft and the 152 passengers and six crew members.
08/09/10 Ajith Athrady/Deccan Herald

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